


Breaks in Routine

by ncfan



Series: Game Night in Cell Block A [2]
Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars: Rebellion Era - All Media Types, Star Wars: Rebels
Genre: Canon Speculation, Gen, Missing Scene, Worldbuilding
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-02-09
Updated: 2017-02-09
Packaged: 2018-09-23 05:10:12
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,209
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9642017
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ncfan/pseuds/ncfan
Summary: Her hair was black. That was... new. [Set during 'The Antilles Extraction'; a companion to 'Diplomacy Is a Process']





	

His predecessor had warned him of the things he would need to keep in mind if he ever found himself on the wrong side of a cell door. At the time, Fenn Rau had been a young man, _very_ young, it felt like now, and with all the brashness of youth, he had assumed that such a thing would never happen to him. But his predecessor was not a man to be ignored lightly, and besides, the man had spent the better part of a year in a holding cell around the close of the last of the civil wars, so he had listened.

Do not despair, even if it seems that you might die. So long as you breathe still, there is a chance you will still escape. You need only keep your eyes sharp for an opening.

Don’t go on a hunger strike, for any reason. It will make it more difficult for you to escape, if the opportunity does present itself.

Do not antagonize your captors needlessly, be they cowards or oathbreakers or kinslayers. There is no point, and you should conduct yourself honorably, even if they do not, and have not. At the same time, always keep in mind that your captors are not your friends. Tell them nothing of any value.

If you are given nothing with which to occupy yourself in your cell, you must not sit idle. Lying in your cot, doing nothing but staring up at the ceiling, that will drive you mad after long enough. Find something to do. Exercise, recite poetry, sing if you must, but don’t just wither away in your cell.

Do not long for the sky. Do not forget the sky, but push it to the back of your mind. Do not long for the sky, do not dream of it, do not let it invade your thoughts when your mind is quiet. Just don’t. You’ll regret it, if you do.

And do not let worry for those you have left behind consume you. Your worry alone will not help them; it will eat you alive, and benefit them not at all. If you truly worry over the well-being of those you left behind, then you should devote your energy to getting back to them more quickly.

That was long ago, well over twenty years ago. Fenn had only been a few years out of exile on Concordia, and had thought imprisonment to have nothing on exile, on being cut off from the homeworld and being lumped in with traitorous terrorists in the process. Surely imprisonment had nothing on having few options but to trade one exile for another, Concordia for Concord Dawn, and no way back to Mandalore but by abandoning all honor. He might have listened, but he hadn’t really taken the words to heart. He suspected there might be some things he’d forgotten. Certainly, some of the points were proving difficult to keep putting into practice, and even if the end result was frustration and incredible _boredom_ instead of all-consuming worry, it was still starting to wear.

The boredom was probably the reason he’d stopped viewing the arrival of his most frequent “guest” with extreme irritation, and instead with something more closely resembling minor annoyance.

Sabine Wren was not Fenn’s only “guest,” not exactly. The Jedi, Jarrus, had shown up at his door once, confirming with his scarred face and sightless eyes what rumors Fenn had heard and Wren had managed to sidestep confirming directly. They had spoken little, and to no good end, for the words flew out of memory now like dust in a summer wind. A clone captain, Rex, had stopped by twice, and they reminisced about old battles and training mishaps in empty space around Kamino. (Seeing one of his old trainees _had_ been a surprise, though rather less unpleasant than Fenn would have liked. He’d spent years training the first few generations of the Republic’s clone army. It was nice to see that his training still served some of them even now, though some might have deserted those to whom they owed rightful allegiance.)

But it was Wren who came most often, creeping so quietly up the corridor that sometimes he didn’t even realize she was there until he heard her talking to one of the guards. She seemed to be especially fond of cubikahd, though she might be a lousy player, for she had the astromech who trailed after her—‘Chopper,’ Fenn had heard her call it once—set up a board every time she came. Wren didn’t talk much when she showed up. At times, she would make a stab or two at conversation, but they tended to fall flat under the combined weight of Fenn’s refusal to cooperate and her own reluctance to tell him anything about what went on outside the cell block.

(Fenn would have liked some word from his men. A status update, an assurance that the Empire hadn’t yet discovered his absence, a _weather report_ , anything would have been nice. He was willing to admit that going this long without contact… unsettled him, even if it was only standard procedure in every reasonable army not to let prisoners have unlimited communication with the outside. But trying to get back in contact with the other Protectors would likely have meant relying on Wren as a go-between. He’d just have to live with radio silence until the opportunity for escape presented itself.)

Why exactly Wren kept coming down here, Fenn really couldn’t determine. He somehow doubted it was for the pleasure of his company, and if the kid really wanted someone to play cubikahd against, surely she could have strong-armed one of her companions into learning how to play the game. There was something else, the intermittent gleam in her eyes, brighter than the reflected light from the game board, or the way her brow knit when she tried to talk about something other than the game, almost as if in trepidation. He was beginning to wonder if Wren would ever come out with it on her own, or if he would just have to force the issue. Maybe once she finally came out with it, was honest with what she _really_ wanted, she’d bother him no more.

For now, when Wren appeared outside the force field that served as his cell door, Fenn Rau was reintroduced to something that tended to be rather lacking from the world when she wasn’t around: color. Bright, _loud_ color.

It was pretty clear that the Rebellion, at least the branch that operated here on Atollon (the guards did like to talk with one another at shift change), had no sort of dress code for their operatives. If they had, there was absolutely no way the paint job on Wren’s armor would have been compliant with regulations, nor the dye job in her hair. A bit of personalization was one thing, but making oneself _that_ distinctive would present enough problems in the field as to be another thing entirely. He wondered if Wren just prided herself on being able to move fast enough that the ‘Please shoot me’ paint job on her armor didn’t matter.

But perhaps that bright, variegated paint job was not entirely without use. Though he’d known her heritage in advance, Fenn had not noticed the clan markings on Wren’s helmet until after he’d been tossed in the back of her and Jarrus’s shuttle. It was effective—if unconventional—camouflage, Fenn would grudgingly admit. The eye was drawn to the vibrant designs and splotches of color on the body of her armor, enough so that even if you knew to look for it, you might not notice the clan markings on her helmet, the marks that so clearly identified who she _was_.

Sabine Wren seemed to be quite enamored of bright—at times, obnoxiously bright—colors, and did not seem at all shy about this love of hers. So when she showed up one evening with all the dye stripped out of her hair, Fenn did what he suspected anyone who knew her, even only in passing, would have done. He did a double-take. And stared.

Wren did not seem to have noticed this lapse, for her expression didn’t shift from careful neutrality as she sat down on the bench opposite from his. “I can’t stay long,” she said, so calmly that he could almost imagine he wasn’t seeing the line of her back tense until it was as straight as a ramrod. “I have to head out tomorrow morning. Early,” and said in the voice of someone who did not _sound_ as though they particularly liked early mornings. She drew her shoulders up slightly as she gestured at Chopper, who had followed her inside markedly more quietly than it usually did. “Do you want to…” Uncertainty blunted the edges of her voice, making her sound younger than her—admittedly few—years.

“Fine.”

Apparently, her natural hair color was black. With the dye stripped out of her hair, Wren suddenly looked naggingly familiar, and Fenn frowned, trying to place it. She was the shade of someone he had met once, long ago, but memory was not exact enough to tell him when, or where, or _who_. After a long moment of raking at the back of his mind, Fenn decided it did not matter enough to dwell on. He’d had run-ins with members of Clan Wren in the past, both during his time with the Protectors, and before, on Concordia. Most likely, a cousin shared eye shape or jawline, and he’d just never looked for a resemblance before now.

Still, after vivid hues of blue and later lavender, plain black was jarring.

Eventually, Wren did notice the way Fenn’s eyes kept flicking from the game board to her head. She frowned lightly, edging backwards just a hair. “What?” There was the slightest edge of belligerence in her voice; not quite the herald of a fight, but a specter, definitely.

No answer was forthcoming. A change in hair color was not exactly high on the list of things Fenn would willingly admit to having been thrown by. Even if the wearer of said hair was fond enough of dyeing her hair colors unnatural to humans that a natural color was just bizarre to have to look at.

But even without an answer, Wren guessed what the issue was soon enough. _“Oh._ ” She clutched at the end of a lock of stray black—plain, dull black!—hair. “I don’t know why everybody’s so shocked,” she muttered, her mouth forming the suggestion of a scowl. “Hair dye isn’t exactly Imperial regulation.” When this explanation got her a quirked eyebrow, she responded tersely, “Infiltration and extraction.”

An explanation spanning three words was a pretty clear message. _You’ll get no more specifics out of me._

The line about the Empire’s dress code regulations hooked memory and drew it back to, of all places, Kamino. Fenn had not left Kamino for a while after the Clone Wars had erupted and the Jedi had sent a representative to oversee the clones’ training. He and Shaak Ti had not spent enough time in each other’s company during off-hours to move past the boundary wall of “colleagues”, nor even “acquaintances.” The Jedi spent most of her off-hours meditating, as it happened.

What Fenn Rau and Shaak Ti had spent a good amount of time doing was having conversations that balanced a knife’s edge between “discussion” and “fight,” mostly about Fenn’s training methods. Words like “inhumane” might have been bandied about, accompanied with phrases like “high risk for little reward” and “corpses can’t learn how to fly.” Sentences like “I don’t see _you_ getting into a fighter pilot and teaching them how to fly” and “If they get dropped green and raw into a warzone, they’ll become corpses that way, too” might have been fired back. These _conversations_ of theirs always managed to stay within the confines of Basic syllables, though they occasionally threatened to leave language behind altogether. In the intervening years, Fenn had come around to Ti’s way of thinking on some of the points she had made, during their _conversations_ , though not all.

Something Fenn Rau and Shaak Ti had wholeheartedly agreed on, though, was greeting the clones’ expressions of individuality with approval. Names to take the place of strings of numbers and letters; dyed or bleached hair; tattoos; painted designs on helmets. Ti spoke of a day when the war would be over, the clones would be properly integrated into galactic society, and a sense of individual identity would benefit them all greatly. Fenn liked to say that he approved just because he could tell them apart more easily that way, but truth be told, the Kaminoans’ dismissive attitude to the personhood of the clones had been disquieting. More than twenty years after he’d first heard it, and it still was.

Shaak Ti was most likely dead now, as were most of the clones she and Fenn had trained—the former slain by the Empire, and the latter worked until they were too worn down to work anymore, or just dropped dead. The Empire treated all its peoples much the same way as the Kaminoans had treated the clones, except that instead of being indifferent to the way their little cogs attired themselves, they actively stamped out any attempt at assertion of uniqueness. But they were powerful enough to squash anyone who tried to assert said uniqueness, and powerful enough to silence anyone who tried to protest. The Empire was strong enough to crush anyone who said or did something that didn’t fit with their vision of how things should be. All the wisest could do was try to weather the storm, as the Jedi couldn’t, as the clones couldn’t.

 _“The Empire wants us to treat them like any clan chieftain who prevailed over us in war, but I think we_ both _know this isn’t the same thing.”_

Yes, Wren would have had ample experience watching people treat the Empire like a clan chieftain to be loyally served, wouldn’t she?

Wren would not willingly give over any mission specifics, and Fenn wasn’t terribly interested in that, anyways. But he still had a question, and he would have it answered.

“Why?” His voice rang out unnaturally loudly in the shadowy little cell, the cool metal walls amplifying volume until a word spoken at normal volume sounded more like a shout.

She looked up, her head snapping up so fast that Fenn was surprised he hadn’t heard a pop, and she practically _shrank_. Wren’s back and shoulders hunched as she folded in on herself like a collapsible chair. To someone who had made a career tracking down criminals, her body language fairly screamed ‘ _Fugitive!’_ She did this often, sometimes sat that way the whole time she was in here. Fenn wondered if she even realized she was doing it. Certainly, her shrinking posture made an interesting contrast with the fact that, just as all the others times, she’d walked in with her blasters still holstered. Was that carelessness, bravado, or some misguided expression of _trust_? If Wren was one of his men, he would have corrected the misstep, and furthermore advised her not to sit like that when speaking with a prisoner; seeing as she was one of his captors instead, he merely reminded himself that he would have a hard time getting home even if he did take her weapons.

Despite the way she shrank, Wren never broke eye contact, her light brown eyes flashing with what looked almost like defiance. Her brow knit. “I didn’t have the easiest time getting out of Sundari after I left the Academy. I don’t want anyone who’s come to the same decision as I did to have the same problems getting out.”

Her words rang out clear and strong in the confines of the cell. There was no trace of shame in Wren’s face, every suggestion of sincerity in her voice, and Fenn didn’t know what to make of that at all, didn’t know if he should be angry, or maybe something else. She did seem to be genuinely devoted to the rebellion, though her cause was one that would surely fail once the Empire set about to crushing it. But…

But Sabine Wren had been born to a clan of traitors, grown up around people who respected only strength, and had precious little conception of honor or loyalty. The best anyone could say about the Wrens was that they were loyal to their own; otherwise, they were just the same as the other clans that followed House Vizsla. The Empire knew little of honor either, and it was the Empire that ruled Mandalore when Sabine Wren was a child; they were the ones who defined honor when Wren was a child, and they said, falsely, that ‘honor’ meant serving them. Sabine Wren had abandoned her duty to Mandalore when she joined the Empire, and had then not even kept her vows to the Empire, for she had deserted the Empire, and joined the rebels. Her loyalty to the rebellion might be sincere _now_ , but Sabine Wren’s loyalty seemed a markedly fickle thing. Too unreliable to be trusted.

Asides from calling out the moves, the game went by in silence. Wren lost, but just about anyone could have predicted that. And it seemed like one game was all she had time for, because when it was done, the droid—Chopper—switched off the game board, and Wren got back to her feet.

“Wren,” Fenn commented as she began to leave, “when you’re on this ‘infiltration and extraction’ mission of yours, try to remember whose side you’re on. The ‘extraction’ part of it won’t end well if you forget where you’re extracting your defectors _to._ ”

Fenn hadn’t known it was possible for someone to roll their eyes with their whole body, but Wren did a good job of it nonetheless. “Trust me, I won’t have any problem with _that_.”

At first, Fenn was content to leave it at that. Infiltration missions were by definition dangerous, and if there was a chance she might die, it seemed only fair to at least let her have the last word. Perhaps, he thought, it would be easier to escape while she was away. But just after Wren and her droid had crossed the threshold and the force field reformed behind them, Fenn found himself calling out, “And Wren?”

Wren stopped, though she did not turn back to face him, not at first. The droid didn’t stop at all, and grumbled a complaint before rolling off out of sight. When Wren turned back around, there was no trace of hostility in her face. Nothing there but narrow-eyed curiosity, though she was silent. Maybe she had imagined something in his voice, or perhaps he’d just had another lapse, and not realized.

“When you get where you’re going, try not to hold yourself like a fugitive,” Fenn advised her, more mildly than he would have liked. “You’ll just get shot.”

Through the golden static of the force field, Wren smiled at him, and even more unexpected than the smile itself was that it actually seemed… Genuine. “I’ll keep that in mind.”


End file.
